Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to control apparatuses for controlling data transmission via a network, and methods for selecting a destination of data.
Description of the Related Art
The reduction in size of devices and the widespread use of wireless LAN have allowed for connection of portable devices to a network. An increasing number of users have had multiple such devices and used different devices for different situations. Here, a smartphone and a single-reflex camera will be discussed as an example. A user who has these two devices may use the smartphone to utilize a high-performance application, and the single-reflex camera to take a photograph.
Incidentally, as a technique of distributing a message to various devices, there is a known distributed process performed in a P-to-P (P2P) system. The technique is used to transfer a message to a device having the lowest processing load.
If the load distributed process technique is applied to an environment in which a user uses multiple devices, a message may not be delivered to a device intended by the user. Even when the user wishes to transmit a message to a device which the user actually uses, the message may be transmitted to another device having a lower processing load which is not intended by the user.
A user (caller) needs to notify another user on the other end (callee) of a network environment (e.g., an IP address, a port number, etc.) in which the caller is currently using a device, and cannot directly transmit a message to a device which the callee is currently using.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-157672 discloses a technique of finding a state of a mobile apparatus before transmitting a signal, to determine whether to transmit a signal to the mobile apparatus based on a state of the mobile apparatus.
However, even when the technique of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-157672 is applied to a case where a user has multiple devices, each device is independently checked based on a state of the device to only make a decision as to whether to transmit a signal to the device. It is not possible to select a suitable one from the multiple devices possessed by the user.
As a result, unless a user who has multiple devices notifies of a network environment of a predetermined device before using the device, the user cannot perform communication, resulting in a decrease in usability.
The present invention provides a technique of delivering a message to a device intended by a user.